Self-Mastery

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“It requires self-awareness plus self-regulation, key components of emotional intelligence. One value of self-mastery is being in the right brain state for the job. When it comes to personal effectiveness, we need to be in the best internal state for the task at hand, and every internal state has its advantages and downsides. Example, a positive mind-state and mind-set provides for more creativity, better problem solving, mental flexibility, and we are more efficient in decision making in so many ways.” - Daniel Coleman, the Brain and Emotional Intelligence 

This speaks to a way of training, practice and application in karate, martial arts and the Way as in the way it is applied to defense as well as life itself. 

“When negatives are involved we have a tendency to be less discriminating in distinguishing weak from strong arguments, or making decisions too quickly, or paying too little attention to detail on a task that demands it.” - Daniel Coleman, the Brain and Emotional Intelligence

Take for instance, a direct counterintuitive to negativity is the somber mood, i.e., being somber includes a greater capacity to pay attention to detail, even in boring tasks - which suggests it is best to get serious before taking to the dojo. Negativity also leads to skepticism and that means we have the ability in the right mind-set and mind-state to question what appears to be factual, relevant, correct and applicable. 

Being somber, a negative emotion, means we tend to question even the experts, we ask those in-depth searching questions, and we tend to come to our own conclusions all being hallmarks of self-master and thus enlightenment. 

Then we find that other emotions contribute to our ability to act in certain ways therefore making our training toward the use of anger important, i.e., “Anger mobilized energy and focuses our attention on removing obstacles that thwart our goals - which can fuel a drive to beat an adversary.” 

A bad mood results, a negative state, in subtle costs to us: At the cognitive level, we become more pessimistic, and are more likely to give up quickly when things go awry that if we maintained a positive and optimistic view especially in training, practice and application of karate and martial arts in self-defense or even life itself giving more credence to its discipline as a way of living through a philosophical endeavor. 

As we begin to perceive in this article, the study of our brains and how they work has a huge effect on what we do, when we do it and how we get it done. This is how we accomplish proper mastery in karate, in martial arts and in self-defense. It comes down to what brain-state we achieve that results in proper mind-set and mind-state to get-r-done. 

How to achieve such lofty goals, i.e., “First, become a voracious data-mining fiend that involve the discipline involved. Cast a wide net and capture as much as you can consume. Second, test it out, vet it and thoroughly examine and prove it either works or not. Third, test all your data, theories and ideas through a rational decision process between what you learn and know with your gut feeling - if it doesn’t feel right then let it go, even if it looks good on paper or on the dojo floor.” Question yourself, stress yourself through your self-awareness emotional intelligence, i.e., “Is what I am about to do in keeping with my sense of purpose, my goals, as to its meaning, effectiveness and applicability as well as moral, ethical and legal state?” This type of effective validation comes from our gut as we practice, train and apply our disciplines over trying to put it into words with our logical human brain. This speaks to effective programming of the zombie sub-routines then storing them in our procedural memories for later retrieval by the lizard brain. 

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